How to Run an Effective Promotion on your Real Estate or Mortgage Facebook Page

One of the most fun and engaging types of content on Facebook is a promotion. For one, people love free stuff. We also love telling our friends about free stuff. And we like feeling special when the free stuff is coming from someone we know and like.

That being said, giving away free stuff doesn’t ensure you’re going to have slam-dunk success on Facebook. There are a number of things you can do to make sure your Facebook Promotion goes off without a hitch, and with lots of engagement. Check out these six ways to run an effective promotion on your real estate or mortgage Facebook page.

Follow Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines

One thing that’s very important is making sure that your promotion doesn’t attract any unwanted attention or sanctions from Facebook. We’ve had a client’s promotion taken down because we missed one of the rules. It sucked because we had to start all over and previous entries were lost. You can read the official rules here, but the main one is this: you can’t require that someone share something to their personal timeline. Only “likes” and comments are ok ways of entry.

Use an Engaging, High-Quality Photo

jon-hasebi-promotion

I cannot stress this one enough. It will probably make or break the success of your promotion. I often talk about the Facebook Fast Thumb which references the quick way in which people thumb through their timeline. You have about 1 second to grab their attention, so use an engaging photo. The best photos are the ones that include both you and the item you’re giving away. (Bonus points if you take it at a location of the item you’re giving away.)

Encourage Entrants to Take an Action

Obviously some action needs to take place in order for people to enter into the promotion. One way to boost your promotion’s engagement is to request users take an additional action such as commenting on the photo, voting for someone’s comment by liking it, or posting their own photo as a comment. All of these actions give your promotion another chance to hit someone’s news feed for their friends to see.

Don’t Forget the Legal Mumbo-Jumbo

With any promotion, you need to make sure you’re doing it the right way. There are a few things you need to mention with each promotion to keep yourself in the clear. Make sure you:

  • Tell them how to enter to win (usually in the main post itself)
  • Give an end date and time
  • Remind them Facebook’s privacy settings may prohibit you from seeing their entry
  • Give them the odds of winning
  • Tell them no purchase is necessary

Here’s what we tack on to the end of each promotion post:

*Giveaway ends (day) at (time). If your privacy settings prohibit us from seeing your entry, we can’t enter you to win. Odds of winning are unknown. No purchase necessary.*

Boost the Post to Your Custom Audience

One way to increase your promotion’s reach and overall effectiveness is to boost the promotion. This is Facebook-speak for running an advertisement. The best part about advertising on Facebook is the specificity with which you can target your audience. We like to boost Facebook promotions using a custom audience.

A custom audience is a custom list of Facebook users identified by email address, phone number, or Facebook user ID. You can upload your client database into Facebook, and, if a user’s email or phone number matches the one in your list, it’ll put them into a custom audience. Your ads will only be shown to those listed in that audience. It’s a great way to make sure as many of your clients are seeing your promotion as possible. It’s also cheap! For a custom audience of a few hundred, $10 should last you your entire promotion.

Announce the Winner on Facebook with a Photo

This last tip is the one most people never do and absolutely carries the biggest payoff. Give legitimacy to your promotions and share in the winner’s success by not only announcing the winner on Facebook, but also posting a photo with you, them, and whatever it is they won. Why do this? Because (with their permission) you can tag them in the photo. Then, sit back and watch as all of their friends say congratulations (and give your page even more exposure).

When we get our clients to do this, we get posts with a natural reach of over seven times the number of likes of the page. For those of you who haven’t had your coffee yet, that means on a page with 100 likes, this one post has the potential to be seen by over 700 people.

carol-flanagan-promotion

Check out this post to see what I mean. I’ve included a screenshot below that shows you how awesome the reach was on this one post:

carol-flanagan-promotion-screenshot

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